Steve Blank > Quotes

“My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

“In the early stages of a startup, focusing on “execution” will put you out of business. Instead, you need a “learning and discovery” process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

“Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Rule No. 1: There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Have we identified a problem a customer wants solved? Does our product solve these customer needs? If so, do we have a viable and profitable business model? Have we learned enough to go out and sell? Answering these questions is the purpose of the first step in the Customer Development model, Customer Discovery. This chapter explains how to go about it.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Start by asking yourself, “What insight do I need to move forward?” Then ask, “What’s the simplest test I can run to get it?” Finally, think about, “How do I design an experiment to run this simple test?” One”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“I ask them, “If the product were free, how many would you actually deploy or use?” The goal is to take pricing away as an issue and see whether the product itself gets customers excited. If it does, I follow up with: “OK, it’s not free. In fact, imagine I charged you $1 million. Would you buy it?” While this may sound like a facetious dialog, I use it all the time. Why? Because more than half the time customers will say something like, “Steve, you’re out of your mind. This product isn’t worth more than $250,000.” I’ve just gotten customers to tell me how much they are willing to pay. Wow.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Being a great entrepreneur means finding the path through the fog, confusion and myriad of choices.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“A business model describes the flow between key components of the company: •  value proposition, which the company offers (product/service, benefits) •  customer segments, such as users, and payers, or moms or teens •  distribution channels to reach customers and offer them the value proposition •  customer relationships to create demand •  revenue streams generated by the value proposition(s) •  resources needed to make the business model possible •  activities necessary to implement the business model •  partners who participate in the business and their motivations for doing so •  cost structure resulting from the business model The”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous. — Sun Tzu,”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions. At its back, a revenue plan blessed by an investor, and composed overwhelmingly of guesses, suddenly becomes an operating plan driving hiring, firing, and spending. Insanity.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“What’s the difference between positioning the product and positioning the company?”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“In short, in big companies, the product spec is market-driven; in startups, the marketing is product-driven.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The greatest risk—and hence the greatest cause of failure—in startups is not in the development of the new product but in the development of customers and markets. Startups”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The best introduction to a prospect is through a peer.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“trying to micromanage employees slows decisions and kills individual initiative. Attempting to impose precise order on how a project in a department is accomplished stifles creativity and leads to a formulistic approach to business problems. Insisting”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” The”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“In Webvan’s case premature scaling was an integral part of the company culture and the prevailing venture capital “get big fast” mantra. Webvan spent $18 million to develop proprietary software and $40 million to set up its first automated warehouse before it had shipped a single item. Premature scaling had dire consequences since Webvan’s spending was on a scale that ensures it will be taught in business school case studies for years to come. As customer behavior continued to differ from the predictions in Webvan’s business plan, the company slowly realized it had overbuilt and over-designed. The business model made sense only at the high volumes predicted on the spreadsheet.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“half-life of a startup VP of Sales is about nine months”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The mantra of Phase 4 of Company Building is provided by the war-fighting doctrine of the U.S. Marine Corps: Whoever can make and implement his decisions consistently faster gains a tremendous, often decisive, advantage. Decision-making thus becomes a time-competitive process, and timeliness of decisions becomes essential to generating tempo.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“In my 25 years as a technology entrepreneur I was lucky to have three extraordinary mentors, each brilliant in his own field: Ben Wegbreit who taught me how to think, Gordon Bell who taught me what to think about, and Allen Michels who showed me how to turn thinking into direct and immediate action.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

“Rule No. 6: Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“When one company owns over 80 percent share (think Microsoft), that player is the owner of the market and a monopolist. The only possible move you have is resegmenting this market.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Market type influences everything a company does.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“one approach to defining the minimum features set is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem the customer will pay us to solve?”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Positioning your product against the slew of existing competitors is accomplished by adroitly picking the correct product features where you are better.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The reality is that testing an unfinished product for Engineering and testing a customer’s willingness to buy an unfinished product are separate, unrelated functions. Customer Validation is not about having customers pay for products that are engineering tests. It’s about validating the entire market and business model.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. —Friedrich Nietzsche”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company